ONLY a quarter of senior positions within Economics around the world’s universities are occupied by women, report researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.
The study was conducted by economist Guido Friebel from Goethe University and his team in cooperation with the Toulouse School of Economics. This was their finding after using a web-scraping algorithm and looking at 238 universities and business schools worldwide and investigating 34, 000 individuals.
Analysis reports show that US women hold only 20 per cent of senior-level positions, and professorships, while in Europe it is 27 per cent and the global average is just 25 per cent.
Scandinavian countries excel in gender equality with Spain, France, and Italy also having positive numbers.
Professor Guido Friebel said: “We fed the algorithm with web addresses from universities, and from there it derived information on the number of professors and junior scholars. “The classification by gender of the persons identified was done on the basis of names and facial recognition software. To verify or correct the data we collected, we wrote to all the institutions. Almost all of them replied, and many deans commended us on this initiative, which was supported by the European Economic Association.”
The major reason for the lack of women in economics is the general attitudes prevalent in the respective society, the researchers concluded. For instance, the institutional rules, the organisational culture of the university, behaviour of men and women in economics were all factors.
A lack of fairness while assessing female and male candidates for the positions is another reason for the decrease in the number of women in the field, the study’s authors discovered.
Most women are interested in development economics, health, labour, and organisations – which are areas that should be strengthened anyway in view of the global situation and societal development, the report stated.
The study suggests mentoring programmes and gender parity in seminars, and conferences can contribute to increasing women’s visibility and to reducing implicit prejudices when filling academic positions.
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